If you know me, you know that my life is driven by lists. I’ve got a whole excel folder full of them. I also have legal pads scattered around full of lists. I even use the notes function on my phone to make lists, particularly daily to-do tasks or grocery runs. The work we did this Sunday? It wasn’t on any list.
Of course, it all needed to be done. There’s no doubt about it. And in truth, part of the reason it wasn’t on any list was because, well, it was overlooked. But in terms of renovations and cleanliness, the items achieved this weekend should have been on the list. I’m half-tempted to add it to the list, just so I can cross it off. (And no, it would not be the first time I’ve ever done that.)
Why the rush? My bestie and her husband are coming to stay with us for a long weekend while we all attend a friend’s wedding. He’s the last to get married and to say it’s going to be a blowout is an understatement. So, because we have company coming, I went into my even deeper cleaning mode. You know those things which are always a little bit dirty but you never even think of them that way? Yep… curtains got cleaned, underbeds vacuumed and the black hole behind the fireplace where we store firewood all cleaned out. I don’t even know us like this.
On the flipside, we also need to nail up the stanchions for the door trim on all of the doors upstairs, but particularly the guest bathroom doors. So, while I was cleaning out the black holes, my husband was sanding, cutting and cleaning our previously primed door trim boards. I added a quick coat of finishing paint and those are now happily drying in our dining room. But, neither cutting nor painting stanchions were on the renovation list. Instead, it simply reads: “Finish door trim.” Well, la-de-dah. There are a lot of steps to finishing door trim and since I didn’t call them all out, today’s effort does not get the additional satisfaction of getting crossed off the list.
But still… darn, this felt good. This is the kind of indoor progress that makes my heart happy. Every time we do something for the house – even if it’s not on the list – it gets us that much closer to the end. And honestly? We did it the right way. The original plan was to cut then install the stanchions. Easy peasy. BUT, when we unbound them from how our contractor had bound them together, we found that there were blemishes in the paint from them sticking together. (I doubt they were ever intended to be bound together that long. 😊) Oh well, we thought, we’ll just sand and paint them in place. But… well, that had the high-risk opportunity of actually causing me and my wild paint brush to get paint on the walls and brand new floors, something I’m loathe to do as those walls are already done. Sand and paint now? Yep. Better idea. That does mean that the stanchions don’t get installed until tomorrow night but that’s fine as well. Company does not come until Thursday.
And finally, I got the doors to my closet finished with a coat of walnut oil. Again, the only thing on the renovation list was “finish final doors”. Since there are still two more to be finished, no crossing off the list. But again, darn happy. In terms of the number of doors left to finish? I’ve now done 12 of 14. Not too shabby. Not off the list, but not shabby at all.
So it goes. Life is a tiny bit sweeter when you can cross items off of the list but right now, we are moving into prep for our Christmas push phase. There are a number of projects we need to finish upstairs that largely need to go in a sort of consecutive order. There is floor leveling that needs to occur before we can finish the final 2X4 area of flooring to be laid. There are also some end boards in both our bedroom and my office. Those must come first. Then, there are some drywall patches with one patch so low to the flooring that we need to complete that before we start putting in baseboards. We have one doorframe to cut to size (no, the original was not installed at the proper height) and the final door can be hung. If you’re doing the math, each finishing step has a step before it. That’s where we are… a step before.
But, it feels good. While being done will feel the best, making progress still feels pretty fabulous. And once this is done? Well, we really will be done. (Just in time for things to start breaking again… 😊) But, we will have executed our vision and more than that, we will have the time/space to do other things. That’s what I’m most looking forward to. Weekends hiking, particularly in fall, and cross country skiing in winter. Summer barbecues and backyard fires. Spring planting. A long weekend away and a quiet snowy evening doing a jigsaw puzzle with a glass of wine.
Until then? Progress is good. If we can make slow and steady progress the next couple of months, we will be in fantastic shape to largely finish the house when we both have time off over Christmas. Since my list have lists, I’ve also calculated the time remaining to complete the list. We’re currently at 106 hours. If we got half of that done, we’d be down to 53 hours. My goal is to have half of the remaining work done between now and when we are off for our Christmas break. With 12 straight days off (but needing to allocate time off for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day), we are looking at a bit of a busy week – at least 6 hours per day. What we don’t get done, we can push into the weekends in January and February with the real “drop dead” goal of having the house done by March 1st. But the more we get done now, the less pressure on Christmas and the less that spills forward into January and February.
And then? Okay, so we’re not wild and crazy kids anymore, but we shall see what trouble we can get into anyway.
The Yuppie Homesteader 